When President George W. Bush stood in front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 20, 2005, and gave his second inaugural address, as this column has noted before, he argued that maintaining freedom in the United States would require spreading freedom all around the world.
“We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion,” Bush declared. “The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.”
“So, it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,” he said.
As Bush said these words, the United States had already been at war in Afghanistan for more than three years. Osama bin Laden, the…
